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EU Looks To Diffuse Internet Bomb Instructions

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:28:49 +0000

When I was in the tenth grade, before anybody’d heard of the Internet except this geek buddy of mine and the geek buddies of his that he connected with like Matthew Broderick did in that movie by plugging his phone into this contraption (this buddy of mine now works for the NSA by the way), my geek-of-all-geeks friend showed me instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb.

I was mildly entertained and suggested we hit Subway before Ravi finished his shift (he always gave us free cookies), never imagining this Internet thing my geek buddy liked so much would even approach the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons, which, obviously, caused depressed geeks to kill themselves.

(Perhaps if he’d shown me you could find naked girls on there I might have made more positive predictions for it. It wouldn’t be until we were college roommates that he introduced me to the World Wide Web of Nudity.)

Anyway, the European Union is quite aware of the availability of bomb-making instructions on the Web and is looking into ways to put a stop to it. Just how they’ll do that is unclear, but they’re having meetings, and we all know that when bureaucrats start having meetings then things are about to happen.

ArsTechnica reports that the EU is considering a ban on using the Internet to distribute bomb-making instructions. Officials cite recent terrorism scares in Europe as reason enough to justify it.

EU security commissioner Franco Frattini suggests an EU explosives database, maintained by Europol, with links to member states as an early warning system for when explosives have been stolen or "a new terrorist modus operandi is discovered from credible intelligence informations."

What that has to with the Internet, and who gave him the right make the word "information" plural with an "s" is unclear, as is the exact criteria for what constitutes "bomb-making instructions," who has rights to such information, for what reasons, why the information couldn’t be found in books, how basic chemistry websites would be protected, how the measures would apply to states outside of the EU, or how it helps anything at all.

You could read the presentation by Frattini at the Europa website, but I doubt it’ll do you much good. In the mean time, expect more fruitless government efforts and lots of information out there they’d rather you didn’t have.

Google Bombs Removed by Separate Algorithm

Nathan Weinberg — Wed, 16 May 2007 22:12:33 +0000

Matt Cutts confirmed in comments at Search Engine Land exactly what I’ve suspected, that Google defuses Google bombs by using specific code designed to do so.

He said, “it’s not a manual change; it’s just a fresh push of our Googlebomb data. The algorithm doesn’t run every day.” Google’s earlier statements seemed to imply that the code Google Search algorithm had been “improved” to the point that Google bombs would be impossible, now we know that is not true, that Google bombs are very possible, but a process that Google runs periodically removes Google bombs, constantly defusing new ones.

Glad that was cleared up.

(via Barry)

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Bextra Bombs Pfizer during the 1Q

John Stith — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 13:58:21 +0000

Pfizer released their first quarter earnings and those earnings plummeted 87% largely due to the Food and Drug Administration booting Bextra from the market place because of concerns with drug connected to heart attacks and skin problems. The world’s largest drug manufacturer claimed this and other charges played the main role in its significant earnings drop.

Pfizer earned 4 cents a share or $301 million down a mountain from the 2.3 billion during the same earnings period a year ago although revenues were up about half a billion from the same period.

Revenue were driven by Lipitor, a cholesterol drug, and rose 23% to $3.1 billion and Zithromax, an antibiotic, jumped 71% to $797 million.

Sales for the Cox-2 inhibitors Celebrex and Bextra have dropped tremendously as both drugs received much scrutiny over possibly causing heart problems. Figures show Celebrex down 47% to $411 million and Bextra bottomed out 79% to $56 million.

Pfizer said that because of these charges, they were forced to revise their predictions dropping total 2005 earnings to $1.98 a share versus $2 a share which both are down from last year’s $2.12 a share.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.